I think #3 would be "Doing the first two without hurting attendance or television ratings", which Goodell seems to have done flawlessly.

On the contrary, based on the NFL's ratings and attendance this season, he's done it fantastically.

Except the important thing to remember is that the NFL is as addictive as any illegal drug, so the owners and the commissioner can get away with making strictly economic decisions.

What the fuck does Al Sharpton know?"

You've misinterpreted the reason for the existence of the NFL. The NFL does not exist so that the game of football can be played. It exists so that the owners can make money. Sports do not "need" an outside ruling body unless they need it to help the owners make more money. Given how the many fiascos the NFL has…

Well, no.

Good stuff.

This is why I think only suckers watch regular season basketball.

I feel like this is a great guide for "normal" Baby Boomer parents, but parents are people, and sometimes people are weird, so I figured I'd throw this bit out as well.

The 3rd quarterback taken?

The beauty of the playoffs is that a team with a loss that is a better matchup for the best teams in the country can still have a chance. Football is such a highly specialized game at this point, it really shouldn't be too shocking that a team that matches up well against #1 and #2 might not match up well against a…

It takes a special level of incompetence to fail as a McDonald's proprietor.

Except the teams with vacancies that have "competent" quarterbacks probably didn't want to hire Ryan as a head coach.

Well, the issue isn't dumb rules so much as it's the design of the game means that the more people care about it, the more exhaustively precise the rules will get.

That's not what is being said in that section of the report at all. It is saying that what the NFL did was defer to "the law of the land" to the point of not asking anyone to give them any information about anything because they figured they would sit around and wait for law enforcement to make a decision before even…

Except it clearly doesn't matter that the investigation was clearly a sham investigation. Ratings, ticket sales and merchandise numbers all appear to be holding up just fine this year.

Why are you so invested in the narrative that Roger Goodell is an incompetent idiot? Do you think his job is to somehow manage the league so that it balances the interests of all the various stakeholders or something? That was never his job.

In addition to the obvious "No Shit Sherlock" response to this, I think it's worth pointing out that the NFL's investigative unit is clearly designed primarily to be a plausible deniability generator for the league office in the event that the public learns more than the league would have wanted them to. Which makes…

The real shame of L.A. not having a football team is not that its citizens don't have a team to root for, but that its NFL-ready market can constantly be dangled over the heads of cash-strapped towns like a guillotine.

Your standard for "Definitively" is ... quite pathetic.